O'Brien's Purpose in Writing TTTC

O’Brien had many motivations to write The Things They Carried, but he states his most integral purpose in "The Lives of the dead”. O’Brien wrote this novel in order to keep the memory of loved ones lost. In "The Lives of the Dead" , he explains Linda, whom he loved, but who died of cancer at age nine. After Linda’s death, O’Brien would dream of talking to her, and she tells him that to be dead is like “being inside a book that nobody’s reading” (O’Brien 232). O’Brien writes The Things They Carried in order to create a book that will be read by everyone, and not only occasionally. Therefore, everyone can experience reading about Linda as she was before she died, as well as all the other characters in the novel who died in the war. O’Brien however has an additional motive to writing this novel, but one that he does not quite admit to. O’Brien does “not look on [his] work as therapy” (O’Brien 152), however he would not have had such an easy “shift from war to peace” (O’Brien 151) if he had not been able to release built up memories and remembered mistakes through writing stories. He states “the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse” (O’Brien 152). O’Brien writes not only to keep his memory strong of the dead, but also to not become overwhelmed with the grief of the death and slaughter he witnessed in his time in the Vietnam War.